| Liquor and Loneliness |
| Summary: | A liquored Pallas opens to Tisiphone for a brief moment. And scares zombie-Alessandra. |
| Date: | 5 July 2041 AE |
| Related Logs: | None |
| Players: |
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| Pilot Berths - Naval Deck - Battlestar Cerberus |
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| Post-Holocaust Day: #128 |
| The battlestar's pilots call this place home. Bunks line the walls with grey curtains to cover their sleeping areas. Lockers sit between each pair of bunks and a round metal table sits in the center, furnished with simple but comfortable steel chairs. A hatch at the rear of the room leads to a communal head. |
| Condition Level: 3 - All Clear |
Downtime. That sacred and dreaded time when pilots are left to their own devices. It's no great secret what Pallas does during his downtime - drink and smoke. The rate that he burns through cigarettes and bottles, it's a certified miracle that he's got anything left - rumor has it that he cleans up pretty good in Triad to keep his brooding fueled. All that to say that he's lounging half out of his bunk, cigarette between his lips, mostly-empty bottle tucked between his legs, humming something quietly under his breath and staring blankly at a small leather pad in his hand. Without so much as blinking, he reaches down to grab the bottle for another swig, oblivious to the world around him.
Is there anything better than being left time with one's own thoughts, here at the end of the worlds? Aside from horrible injury, screaming fiery death, Cylon capture and vivisection… Tisiphone enters through the hatch, tense and trailing cigarette smoke. She's all the way to her locker, twisting the combination out on it, before she inquires without turning, "What's the poison tonight, Spiral?"
Dead silence in reply. The question hangs in the air as a clump of ash falls from the tip of his cigarette right onto his bed unnoticed. Another swallow of the blackish liquid. He's got the routine down to a science - pluck the bottle from his lap, drink from the side of his mouth away from the cigarette, and neatly plunk it right back down while taking a puff to smooth over the bitter taste. "Fraggiv I know what this is," he finally answers, voice none too steady. "Got it off some Marine." The pad gets flipped shut with a flick of the wrist and tossed to the far corner of his bunk by his pillow. But he doesn't need props to stare off blankly into nothingness.
The answer takes long enough to come that Tisiphone looks back over her shoulder, watching the older pilot as he performs his long-practiced smoke-and-drink juggle. "Looks like watered-down bearing grease. You win the bet or lose it?" Back to her locker, rummaging, a puff of smoke marking her single, inaudible chuckle.
Smoke seeps slowly from his nostrils at the end of yet another round of the ritual. "We all lost the bet," he says in a faraway voice. "All that's left is what the dead will give us." He spits out what's left of the smoke onto the floor, letting it burn away on its own. Haunted eyes wander unevenly toward Tisiphone's general direction, narrowing slightly, then look away again. "Never congra…tu…lated you on your promotion," he says with a shrug. No congratulations are actually given, but he holds the bottle out to her. Unsteadily.
"You drinking a dead man's stash? You never do that alone. Shit's haunted." Tisiphone's locker closes with a CLANG, the padlock snapping back on a second later. Hands slouched down into her pockets, cigarette dangling precariously from the corner of her mouth, she paces a few steps over, watching Pallas the whole while. "Nah, you didn't. Don't feel bad. Only person who did was Shiv, and that's only because I nearly bawled at putting my own frakking pins on." Cue one (1) smoky snort. She turns sharply, closing the distance between them, and snags the bottle. Holds it up to the light. Maybe she's checking for spit in it.
It'd be damned hard to tell if there was any spit in it - it really is a nearly black viscous fluid that isn't wholly unlike the suggested bearing grease. "It's all a dead man's stash," he says with a dark chuckle. "The only difference is, some of them're still walking." As though uncomfortable with the proximity, he slides back and sideways in his bunk - it could also look like he's moving over to make room for her to sit down.
"Mother of the gods, the frak /is/ this stuff?" Tisiphone mutters, swishing it around in the bottle a little, giving it a very dubious eye. He shifts over, and she takes a step to the empty side of his bunk, without seeming much to realize it. Escape angles and approach trajectories. "What's got you grey instead of poisonous tonight?" she asks. No guts, no glory — she lifts the bottle for a swig.
"Today is…" Spiral starts. And that's as far as he gets. He glances over to her, eyes narrowing again. "You, of all the fraggin' people," he mutters under his breath. Something between a snarl and a sneer crosses his face, like he's just swallowed something distasteful. A scoff follows a sigh, and he tries again. Liquor and loneliness overpower snappish bitterness on a night like this. "Today would've been my son's thirteenth birthday."
"Pfah!" Tisiphone grimaces breathlessly against the alcohol's — if, in fact, it's fair to call the substance that — bite, and holds it out at arm's length to squint at. Still. It /is/ free. She takes another swig, shuddering hard, and offers it back with a little twitch of her wrist. Splish-splish. "Yeah?" is all she responds at first. She's more than a little wary. Then: "What was his name?"
It's fairly quiet in the bunks. Pallas is sitting back in his bunk off to one side, Tisiphone standing by it - and they seem to be (gasp and dismay) having a civil conversation. It's possible that the nearly-empty bottle that she's handing back to him has something to do with it. Near-empty becomes fully so as the old man drains away the last of the black fluid, whatever it was, and lets the bottle roll carelessly on his bed amidst ashes and spent cigarette butts. "Thaddeus." Drunk as he is, the name is pronounced clearly and carefully.
Allie comes in, fresh from the head after having disappeared for a while. She looks exhausted and doesn't even seem to notice if she's alone or not as she zombie-shuffles towards her bunk with not so much as a grunt to announce her arrival or as a means of greeting. The towel she has in hand is scrubbed through her wet hair several times before it's tossed upon her bunk, the soft *thump* of cloth upon the bed nearly silent.
Tisiphone, meanwhile, still hasn't shook the tail-end of the grimace from her own taste of whatever-in-Hades the booze was. The black tears of a dead and rotting god, perhaps. Her free hand is slouched down into her pocket; the other plucks her cigarette from her mouth as she exhales. "Good name," she says. "You get to see him much?" Her weight bounces on the balls of her feet for a second. Someone's a little edgy. She looks over with a snap when the head hatch opens, hand paused mid-way in tucking her cigarette back into her mouth.
"No." Spiral's answer carries finality to it, coinciding with Alessandra's entrance. He watches wordlessly as the half-dead Squadron Leader moves across the room, also offering nothing in the way of greetings. With a grunt, he scoots himself forward in his bunk a bit, leans precariously over the side, and slams his fist hard into his locker. BANG! Hope nobody was trying to catch any sleep. The unlocked door swings open. Moving back in his bunk again, he jerks a thumb to his stash within. "Pick something," he says to Tisi.
If that was done to gain some kind of response from Lucky it's successful as she wheels around upon hearing the ruckus, her eyes widening as she startles. "Frak…oh. Godsdammit, Spiral." Not much of a verbal outburst but it's obvious she's not too happy over being scared. She darts a look between him and then over to where Tisiphone stands while her arms cross over her front, left limb draped over right.
"Pick something, hey? Yer not about to airlock yourself, are you?" The question is light — negligently so, even — as Tisiphone steps up to Pallas's open locker and sweeps it with the gaze of a practiced looter. Kythera taught her many things. "Don't expect me to pour something out for you if you- the frak kind of mag is-" Her head twists suddenly, owl-like, and she recoils a few inches. "-nevermind. Looks like the pages are glued together." A slim arm snakes into the locker and comes out with a mostly-empty bottle of less-brackish-looking liquid.
"I meant pick something else to drink," Pallas says, indicating the empty bottle. "You fraggin' Saggies'll take anything that's not bolted down." As Alessandra comes around, he just gives her an uncharacteristically sunny smile in response to her little outburst. Spiral, smiling? Ostensibly getting along with Tisiphone? Either something has gone horribly awry or he's a lot drunker than he's letting on.
Alessandra eyes Pallas for a while, that smile getting her to relax marginally. "Yeah…" Shaking her head, she turns back around, her own locker tugged open and rifled through as she sets about looking for something. "Nice to see you two getting along," she adds just as her arm's extracted, a small box held in hand which is then set carefully next to the towel she had rid herself up a minute ago. She's short on words, currently, not sure what can be said, her expression wary and apprehensive.
"Don't get bitchy with me because you weren't precise," says Tisiphone to Pallas, cigarette sifting ash down her tank-top as she speaks. She wrestles the bottle open and sniffs at it, cutting a sidelong glance to Alessandra as she does. "Not sure I'd call this getting along." Not that she provides a better term for it, though. She takes a swig from the bottle, shuddering at whatever the contents are, and sticks it out toward Pallas. Take. Now. Shameless mooch she may be, but these things only go so far.
As soon as Alessandra turns away, the smile fades off his face instantly. He takes the bottle from Tisiphone, squints at the torn label, and shrugs. Liquor is liquor, and he'd be hard-pressed to look surprised if he found out some people bring bottles laced with rat poison for the sole purpose of losing them to him at Triad. He winces as the burn goes down. "Shoulda known better'n to yet you choose," he mutters as he hands it back. "That's worse than the one before." And then he's up out of his bunk and stumbling off toward the head, presumably to break the seal. Doesn't even say a word, just ups and goes leaving his bunk behind. He makes a fair bit of noise during his exit, bumping into lockers, stumbling and steadying himself on bunks as he goes.
Alessandra darts a look to Pallas as he ambles towards the head, her lips pursed before she calls out, "Would like to have a meeting with you soon, Pallas." Whether he heard her and/or will remember that come tomorrow, depending on his level of intoxication now. Shaking her head, then, she turns around, looking at Tisiphone, her brow arching now. "I'm going to be holding a memorial service soon, Tis. If you'd like to do anything special for it let me know." Not fun to have to bring that up but it is something she has accepted as one of her duties along with everything else.